RazorBrain's Go Journal

How to Work Life & Death Problems by RazorBrain

One way to improve your game dramatically is to regularly work life and death problems. But many beginners are put off by this because they lack a workable approach to tackling challenging problems. I have found that working life and death problems requires patience more than anything else. Yes, a trained eye is useful in a game, but we develop the ‘intuition,’ if you will, that a trained eye depends upon by working lot’s of life and death problems both in and out of games. This post then is all about process and patience for new players.

We develop the ‘intuition’ that a trained eye depends upon by working lot’s of life and death problems.

When you don’t have the experience to ‘see the obvious move’ what do you do? The answer is that you let process and patience do their jobs until the answer is clear. To begin, let’s take a tried and true method that I first read about in a book titled “Tesuji” by James Davies. We’ll apply patience, perhaps throw in a bit of stubbornness and we’ll learn how to effectively work life & death problems. The method or process is easy but can seem hard when we try to apply it to problems that stretch us. But it works! stick with it.

Here’s the method: select the move you think is the right one and play it in your head, then respond for your opponent with the best response you can think of. Then continue making moves for both you and your opponent until you prove that your moves are correct or incorrect. They are correct if you are able to kill or live depending on the objective of the problem despite any attempt by your opponent to foil your plans.

Something is incorrect if one of your opponent’s responses causes you to miss your objective. If you see that one of your moves is incorrect, back up to that move and try another one, then again respond for your opponent just as you did before. If you see that your moves seem to work, then back up again and this time play a different response for your opponent and play out the problem again. Continue to do this for both you and your opponent until you have exhausted all of the possible options.

Discipline and concentration will win everytime over a good guess. So, while you might not be able to work out problems that are way above your level, you should be able to patiently work out problems rated at your strength or slightly higher without your brain tapping out and begging for a guess. The video below shows an example of this method at work. The example problem is rated at 20 kyu. So, if you’re between 30 and 15 kyu, you should find this video helpful, especially if you are new to working life and death problems.

If you’d like to see other video tutorials on this topic or other topics, leave me a comment and I’ll add your request to my list of blog projects.

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